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Sustainable Consumption Institute

Consumption is a hugely powerful force.

The sustainability challenges we face stem largely from an explosion in consumption, and the corresponding exploitation of finite resources. To successfully respond to these challenges, we must now radically reduce the resource intensity of everyday lives.

This may mean consuming less, or it could mean consuming differently. Either approach requires big leaps in our understanding and our actions – not simply how we produce and distribute goods and services, but how we organise our societies, government policy, and our lives.

Our mission at the Sustainable Consumption Institute is to bring insight and clarity to a key part of the sustainability challenge: the role of consumption.

Person

Prof Dale Southerton

My broad interests concern theories and processes of social change and its implications for the ordering of daily life. This leads to more specialised interests in: Consumption and everyday life, Theories of practice, Climate change and sustainability, Time and the temporal ordering of daily life, Social relations and differentiation, Socio-technical systems and innovation processes, and Comparative analysis (over time and space).

Person

Dr Josephine Mylan

Jo's research interests lie in understanding how society can transition to more environmentally sustainable ways of consuming resources. This will require changes in the way we provision goods, including the technologies, economic and social arrangements, and cultural conventions which shape processes of production, distribution and consumption.

Person

Dr Joanne Swaffield

Joanne Swaffield joined the Sustainable Consumption Institute as a Research Associate in November 2013. Her current research focuses on the construction of ‘appropriate’ sustainable behaviour and the role of reuse networks in modern neoliberal society. Jo is also involved in the ESRC funded project, ‘Households, Retailers and Food Waste Transitions’.

Jo’s research interests include, the discursive construction of (un)sustainable behaviour, the ‘neoliberalisation’ of environmental governance and the role of environmental ‘change agents’ in neoliberal society.

Person

Dr Alison Browne

Alison has a number of active and interdisciplinary research projects on everyday practice and sustainable consumption; dirt, cleanliness and freshness; and the governance of water resources, drought, and climate change adaptation. In previous research projects she explored the governance of large scale resource development (e.g., agriculture, NRM, water infrastructure, mining) using 'environmentality', 'risk' and 'mega-project paradox' frameworks.

Person

Dr Dan Welch

Dan’s research interests include: cultural economy and cultural intermediation; social ontology and theories of practice; sustainability communications and commercial communications more widely; and sustainable consumption as discourse and practice. He is interested in exploring neglected theoretical resources within theories of practice for the study of sustainable consumption, as well as developing links between practice theory and complementary approaches such as socio-technical transitions and economic sociology.